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Digital Sharing for Apple Users: A Take Control Crash Course

Learn the best ways to share your data, documents, and devices!

Beyond keeping track of what’s new in the latest operating system is the larger problem facing most of us—how to work effectively in today’s ecosystem of devices, servers, and collaborators. Frankly, sharing with other people and devices is messy, because everyone wants something different. That’s why this may be our most important book, and why we are so grateful to Joe Kissell for taking on the challenge of describing how to share nearly everything you can think of in nearly every imaginable situation.

Here are just a few of the gems in this book:

How iCloud Photo Sharing and My Photo Stream are entirely different

How to share photos fleetingly, privately, permanently, or with your fridge

The best ways to sync a project’s worth of files with others

Services to provide ubiquitous access to your own files across devices

Quick ways to make a file available for download by anyone

How to share calendars with others, whether or not they use iCloud

A tutorial on enabling Family Sharing

Tweaky workarounds for contact sharing, which is surprisingly difficult

How to rip a DVD to your MacBook Air using an older Mac’s SuperDrive

How to turn your iPhone or Mac into a Wi-Fi hotspot

Ways of watching your uncle work remotely, as you help him with iTunes

And, thanks to the Take Control Crash Course format, you can jump right to the chapter that answers your question, without having to read through lots of other information — as part of our Crash Course series, this book provides the first-rate content you expect from us in short chunks so you can dip in and read quickly. Because so many Take Control readers give tech support to others, each concise chapter has sharing buttons and practical tweet-tips, making it easy to share a few pages with Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and others who need the info. Crash Courses have a modern, magazine-like layout in PDF while retaining a reflowable design in the EPUB and Mobipocket versions.

What's New

What’s New in Version 1.3

This book contains numerous small changes that reflect the latest versions of OS X, iOS, and various apps and services. The most significant changes are these:

Renamed and rearranged the chapters Sync Photos and Videos across Devices and Sync a Photo Library across Devices, and updated them to cover Photos and iCloud Photo Library on all supported platforms

Updated the coverage of Photos and iCloud Photo Sharing, as well as the instructions for viewing photo albums on a 4th-generation Apple TV, in Broadcast and Share Photo Albums

Revised the instructions for using Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync in Sync Folders with Others

Updated various details of using Dropbox and iCloud Drive, including the new iCloud Drive app for iOS, in Broadcast Download Links

Modified Share Documents with Others to reflect changes in the user interface for sharing with iWork and Google Drive apps

Updated the instructions for using Google Chrome for iOS, and added instructions for the new iOS version of Firefox, in both Broadcast Browser Tabs to Other Devices and Sync Browser Bookmarks across Devices

Added a sidebar about 1Password for Teams in Sync Passwords with Others

Removed Rdio and Beats Music from Send Radio Stations to Others

Updated Broadcast an iTunes Library in Your Home to include the 4th-generation Apple TV

FAQ

What operating systems does this book expect that I am running on my devices?

All the techniques in this book work with OS X 10.10 Yosemite and 10.11 El Capitan, iOS 8 and iOS 9, or any combination. Many also work with older versions of the two operating systems—perhaps with minor modifications. Joe doesn’t spell out those differences or compatibility issues, but in general, the older your version of OS X or iOS, the less likely you’ll find that everything works as described.

Update Plans

December 18, 2015 — Now that we’ve updated this title for iOS 9, 10.11 El Capitan, and tvOS on the 4th-generation Apple TV, we don’t have any immediate plans to update it again. Of course, we’ll keep an eye on changes that may arrive in future Apple updates and if we do schedule another update, I’ll tell you about it here.

If you use your iPhone or iPad to create a Wi-Fi hotspot for your other devices, you should know that a weak cellular signal not only may affect data transfer speed but also requires your your hotspot-supplying device to use more power — and that means your hotspot’s battery drains more quickly. If your device’s five dot signal-strength indicator does not give you enough information about the strength of a signal (“is that 3-dot signal closer to a 2 or a 4?”), you can make your device show you the exact RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) measured in decibel-milliwatts. Josh Centers has written up the steps in TidBITS.

No Mac is an island, and neither is an iPhone or iPad. But figuring out how to get all your silicon-based pals to share your stuff with whom you want (and not with whom you don’t want) can be confusing if you don’t have a guide. Happily for all of us, Joe has put together just such a guide, and he shares some of its secrets with Chuck Joiner of MacVoices. Let us share that interview with you.

Take Control publisher Joe Kissell has written more than 60 books about technology, including many popular Take Control books. He also runs Interesting Thing of the Day and is a contributing editor of TidBITS and a senior contributor to Macworld.

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